In 2019,after the success of his book,Vance returned to Ohio and founded a venture firm. Vance has hosted or helped organise high-dollar fundraisers for Trump,including one in June hosted by Silicon Valley entrepreneur David Sacks.
His evolution on Trump was perhaps not entirely unpredictable. To Rose in 2016,Vance saidhe felt “elites” directed an attitude of “we told you so” towards white working-class Trump supporters.
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“The problem is if you take that attitude as sort of gloating … then you’re playing into the very thing that gave rise to Trump in the first place,which is a feeling that the elites think that they are smarter than you and just think you’re a bunch of idiots,” Vance said then.
In a 2018 print run ofHillbilly Elegy,Vance revealed he voted for a third-party candidate in 2016. But while he still had “reservations” about Trump two years into his term,Vance also wrote that there were aspects of his candidacy that had appealed to him,including Trump’s “disdain for the ‘elites’ and criticism of foreign policy blunders in Iraq and Afghanistan” by previous administrations.
Trump endorsed Vance as a first-time candidate running in a crowded 2022 Republican primary for Senate. He dismissed Vance’s past criticisms of him,saying in a statement at the time that the venture capitalist “gets it now,and I have seen that in spades”.
“He is our best chance for victory in what could be a very tough race,” Trump added.
Vance went on to win the primary and the general election. During his term,the Ohio Republican has embraced a more populist direction for the GOP under Trump,vehemently criticising US aid to Ukraine and becoming one of the most ubiquitous defenders of the former president.
Vance showed his support outside the New York courthouse during Trump’s criminal trial earlier this year,and boosted the presumptive GOP presidential nominee in frequent appearances,defending him on cable TV. Vance also has grown close with Trump’s eldest son,Donald Trump Jr.,despite a striking contrast in his hardscrabble upbringing to that of the wealthy New York real estate family.
Soon after the July 13 shooting at a Trump campaign rally in Butler,Pennsylvania,Vance promptly blamed Biden’s campaign “rhetoric” for the incident,drawing criticism for escalating the situation before full details had emerged.
Credit:Matt Golding
Vance has also previously echoed Trump’s false claims about widespread fraud in the 2020 election,and he has indicated that he would have taken a different path on January 6,2021 than Pence. Vance told America’s ABC News in February that if he had been vice president,he would have allowed Congress to consider fraudulent slates of pro-Trump electors.
“If I had been vice president,I would have told the states,like Pennsylvania,Georgia and so many others,that we needed to have multiple slates of electors,and I think the US Congress should have fought over it from there,” Vance said.
Vance would not commit unequivocally to accepting the results of the 2024 election,telling NBC’sMeet the Press earlier this month that he would do so “so long as it’s a free and fair election”.
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“We’re just trying to work to elect Donald Trump. Whoever his vice president is,he’s got a lot of good people he could choose from,” Vance said. “It’s the policies that worked and the leadership style that worked for the American people. I think we have to bring that back to the White House,and I’m fighting to try to do that.”
The Washington Post
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